A terrorist attack poses a significant threat to public safety. Aside from casualties caused by the event itself, there may be collateral damage as a result of the attack's aftermath. For example, damage to urban infrastructure may cut essential services, such as water and electricity, to certain parts of the city. An attack on a dam or nuclear facility may require evacuation of selected portions of an urban area.
Responsibility for planning responses to such incidents, as well as for execution of such responses, typically falls on various emergency management agencies. These agencies have different jurisdictions. Some are responsible for a city. Others are responsible at a state or county level. Others, such as FEMA, are responsible on a nationwide scale.
To mitigate casualties as a result of such incidents, it is useful to provide these agencies with information about the residents of particular geographic areas. For example, if electricity is cut to a certain district of the city, it may be useful for an emergency management agency to know which residents of that district, if any, rely on electrically powered medical equipment. Such information would enable the emergency management agency to evacuate those residents first.
Another example of information that is useful in planning emergency response is information about pets in a particular geographic area. While information about pets might seem of little consequence, it has been found that those who resist evacuation often do so because they discover that they cannot bring their pets to a shelter with them. Thus, in planning the locations of emergency shelters near a zone, such information would enable the emergency planners to include appropriate pet care facilities for any shelters intended for evacuation of residents in that zone. This in turn would encourage compliance with an evacuation order and thereby reduce casualties, thus mitigating damage associated with a terrorist attack.
In practice, however, there is no systematic way of acquiring, disseminating, and updating information of this type.
Timely and effective planning and response to emergencies thus depends on accurate and easily accessible information. Emergency management agencies charged with mitigating the effects of an emergency as well as reacting to incidents require a clear picture into the risks associated with the incident itself and with the various options available for mitigating the damage resulting from the incident. There is an increasing recognition that having access to timely and accurate information can increase the accuracy and speed of decisions, thereby improving the incident outcome. GIS (“Geographic Information Systems”), ALI (Automatic Location Information) databases, basic opt-in user portals for emergency notification systems, paper based systems, or simple databases of localized information and other similar tools have been developed to provide such information to public safety agencies.
A number of attempts have been made to collect information from the general population in support of emergency management or emergency preparedness activities. These systems tend to reside locally within a particular public safety answering point (“PSAP”) or a particular emergency management organization. As such, these systems are managed solely by these resources and not available to others that might be called upon to assist in a large scale disaster.
Other systems are made available to the general public via the internet. Examples of such systems include, the New Jersey special needs registry, the Broward County, Florida vulnerable population registry, the Utah special needs registry, the Clay County, Minnesota vulnerable population registry, the Fargo, N. Dak. vulnerable population registry, the Kansas vulnerable needs planning system, and the Wilkin County Minnesota vulnerable population registry.